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Douglas Todd: Hundreds of quiet East Vancouver side streets upzoned for six-storey apartment blocks

Some residents in the vast Rupert and Renfrew area did not know their pleasant side streets had been upzoned for six- to eight-storey apartment blocks. It calls into question the city of Vancouver's murky "engagement strategy."

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The City of Vancouver has resorted to slick marketing while radically upzoning some pleasant, leafy neighbourhoods in East Vancouver, which taken together are much larger than Stanley Park.

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In the process of upzoning almost 2,600 city lots for six- and eight-storey apartment blocks, council and staff have created a new definition of “low rise” and featured idyllic watercolour illustrations of what they call the Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan.

Some of the visual and written material has little resemblance to what council’s unanimous mass upzoning decision on Jan. 13 actually sets in motion for the vast, 6.6-sq.-km. mostly residential region south of the Pacific National Exhibition.

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Council’s sweeping upzoning has the capacity to impact most side streets and dwellings in the 200 blocks between Boundary Road and Kamloops Avenue, and Parker Avenue and 29th Street.

The pre-zoning could radically alter many tranquil neighbourhoods, which are largely made up of single-detached houses, duplexes and, increasingly, four- to six-plexes. The affected area includes eight public schools, and features boulevard trees and views of the North Shore mountains.

Most of the dwellings in the area can, without site-specific rezoning, be torn down and replaced with six-storey condominiums or rental blocks. And if developers include a portion of below-market units in the residential buildings, they can go up to eight storeys.

That means any typical two-storey house in the vast East Vancouver region could, after a land assembly, end up next to a sizeable apartment building that is three to four times taller, with attendant traffic, parking and congestion problems.

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Some people interviewed on the streets did not know the zoning was in the works or had been approved on Jan. 13.

“This place is very wonderful and quiet,” said Joseph Hui, a UBC student, as he walked near Nootka Street and Second Avenue. Hui had not heard about the upzoning. “I think it will change the views and neighbourliness and everything. It’s better to keep it as it is.”

This is the first time the city has pre-zoned such a large swath of single-detached lots that are not on arterial streets for six- to eight-storey buildings.

In the urban design world, the term “low rise” normally applies to buildings of four storeys or less. A six-storey building, which can rise to 23 metres, is customarily referred to as “mid-rise.”

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However, the city now regularly refers to six- and eight-storey buildings, or R3 zoning, as “low-rise.” That’s despite acknowledging an eight-storey building can climb to 27 metres, about double the height of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“They’re pulling the wool over our eyes,” said Tana Marini, who lives near Fourth and Slocan.

Marini wasn’t aware until last week that the so-called Rupert and Renfrew station region, which includes large chunks of the Hasting-Sunrise and Renfrew Collingwood neighbourhoods, had been rezoned.

“Almost no one’s heard of it,” said Marini. She speculated that, if the city had delivered background material to her neighbours about something dubbed a “Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan,” many residents may have not taken note of it.

That is mainly because the Rupert and Renfrew SkyTrain stations are more than 1.5 kilometres away from Marini’s home. She almost never uses the SkyTrain stations, preferring instead the 99 B-line express bus.

Setting aside the debate over the value of having mid-rise apartment blocks in residential neighbourhoods, the marketing techniques used by the City of Vancouver’s so-called “engagement” department, which is supposed to encourage citizen input, cry out for examination.

Some of the city’s published material has been confusing or vague.

One notice the city distributed to residents on Christmas Eve 2025 incorrectly stated the public hearing for the Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan would occur on Jan. 13, 2025 — the wrong year.

At last month’s’ public hearing, according to the city’s webpage, only three people offered their opinions at the meeting. Normally hundreds weigh in at major rezoning hearings. Two speakers were opposed, and one supported. The mass upzoning has received minimal media coverage.

The city maintains it obtained 487 completed surveys about its plan, showing “strong support for increasing housing density.” One of the few negatives the city acknowledged was that some people had “questions about shadowing from six-storey buildings.”

When Postmedia asked the City of Vancouver to provide some visuals indicating what a six- or eight-storey apartment block would look like in the region, they sent an architectural rendering that included only a few four-storey buildings.

The rendering, painted in soft watercolour, also offered only a “bird’s-eye view” of the reconstituted neighbourhood. It did not provide street-levels views, which provide a more no-nonsense depiction of a building’s mass.

In addition, the cover of the planning documents for the Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plans include idyllic illustrations of a utopia without cars — adorned instead with bicycles, people in yoga poses, joggers, glistening transit vehicles, funky stores, charming, tiny apartment buildings, and even a fish leaping from a pond.

Marini said people can obtain a much better sense of what is really coming down the pike for the Rupert and Renfrew areas by looking at the six-storey buildings already under construction on nearby arterial streets, including on Broadway. They dwarf the adjacent two-storey homes.

Erick Villagomez, a lecturer in regional planning at UBC, agreed that City Hall staff and developers often mislead the public about their actual planning intentions, including by using vaguely worded policy statements and distorted visualizations.

“What the city is likely envisioning (for the Rupert and Renfew areas) are mid-rise, wood-frame apartment buildings similar to what you see along parts of Broadway west of Nanaimo — typically six storeys over a concrete podium or parkade,” he said. “For residents accustomed to one- and two-storey houses, six to eight storeys will likely not feel low,” Villagomez said.

The 200 blocks of the Rupert and Renfew areas will not transform overnight, Villagomez said, as developers assemble three to six combined lots. “What will likely happen is incremental — isolated assemblies near transit first, then gradual infill over years or decades, depending on market conditions.”

While soaring towers of up to 45 stories are slated for within 800 metres of the Rupert and Renfrew Skytrain stations, Villagomez said the surrounding neighbourhoods will likely end up with “solid, blocky mid-rise buildings that shift the scale of certain streets from detached-house rhythm to apartment-frontage rhythm.”

It remains to be seen, Villagomez said, whether the new structures will be affordable, ecological, or provide a quality living environment. As to questions about whether six- to eight-storey buildings represent the kind of housing residents need, we’ll dig into that in a future column.

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